(perhaps we have done something wrong) as well as the desire to stop doing some-
thing that the angry person disapproves of (Giner-Sorolla & Espinoza, 2011;
Wilkowski, 2012). All in all, perhaps our survival as a species has some relation
to our sensitivity to possible threat, whether physical or social, signaled by others’
angry facial expressions.
The influence exerted on us by others’facial expressions is not limited to those
faces that we consciously see and take note of. Nonconscious, subliminal percep-
tion effects have been uncovered as well. Murphy and Zajonc (1993) showed peo-
ple a happy or an angry face for only 4 milliseconds, an interval much too short to
allow for conscious perception of the faces, followed by unfamiliar stimuli—in this
case, written Chinese characters. When the experimenters asked the participants
how much they liked each Chinese character, they found that characters preceded
by a happy face were liked more than those preceded by an angry face. More
recently, Dimberg, Thunberg, and Elmehed (2000) found that subliminally expos-
ing people to happy or angry facial expressions produced corresponding facial
movements according to EMG measurements. In this case, both the stimulus (the
faces seen) and the response (the small facial movements picked up by EMG
recording) occurred nonconsciously.
SUMMARY
The face is a multimessage system. It can com-
municate information regarding personality,
interest, and responsiveness during interaction,
emotional states, and how people want to pres-
ent themselves to others. Although we know
that people associate certain personality charac-
teristics with certain expressions and facial
features, we do not fully know how accurate
these impressions are. We know the face is used
as a conversational regulator that opens and
closes communication channels, complements
and qualifies other behaviors, and replaces spoken
messages.
Facial expressions are very complex entities
to deal with. Of all the areas of the body, the
face seems to elicit the best external and inter-
nal feedback, which makes it easy for us to
follow a variety of facial display rules. Not all
facial displays represent single emotions; some
are blends of several emotions. Sometimes we
show aspects of an emotional display when we
are not actually feeling emotional, as with
facial emblems that represent commentary on
emotions. At other times the emotion we are
feeling is not very predictably shown on our
face. The question of how often the face
spontaneously reveals emotional experiences in
daily life is hotly contested.
We noted some measurement issues involved
in the study of facial expressions: the complexity
of the decisions observers are asked to make, sim-
ulated as opposed to real expressions, the method
of presenting the face to the observer—films,
photos, and the like—and knowledge of the con-
text. Naturally, all these factors may impinge on
our accuracy in identifying facial expressions of
emotion.
Accuracy in judging the face tends to be high,
at least when prototypic expressions are pre-
sented. Furthermore, certain basic emotions
have been found to be accurately judged in cul-
tures around the world: anger, fear, disgust, sad-
ness, happiness, surprise, and contempt. To
understand what the face actually does during
the expression of emotion, anatomically based
coding systems, such as the FACS, have been
developed. The FACS can identify which muscles
are involved in different kinds of expressions.
A psychophysiological approach has added
much to our understanding of facial behavior.
People with more expressive faces have less activ-
ity in their autonomic nervous systems than do
CHAPTER 9THE EFFECTS OF THE FACE ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 293